Alienation in the Guest and a Soldiers Home

¶ … Guest & a Soldier's Home

Definitions of Alienation

According to Karl Marx, alienation is "…the process whereby the worker is made to feel foreign to the products of his/her own labor" (Purdue.edu). Marx asserts that the worker laboring for a capitalist corporation or a business is alienated because he does not own that product, someone else does, and his sweat and tears go into the production of items that another entity benefits from (Purdue.edu). The Merriam-Webster definition: "…a withdrawing or separation of a person or a person's affections from an object or position of former attachment" (www.merriam-Webster.com).

Self Alienation in The Guest and A Soldier's Home

A Soldier's Home: Since Krebs felt he had to lie to get anyone to listen to him he was technically alienated from the truth, and that removed him from the mainstream in society. It was his own doing of course. Krebs likes to look at the young girls that had grown up while he was off to war, but he did not have "the courage" or the "energy" to bust into the circle of friends those girls were part of. Their alliances were already "defined" and though there were "so many good-looking girls" he just couldn't motivate himself to try and become friends, hence he alienated himself from them (by his own design). Hemingway goes into great detail to explain how much Krebs enjoyed thinking about women and watching them, and speculating about them, but the truth was that Krebs did not want to spend the time and energy on courting a woman, and basically he had decided to alienate himself from things he was attracted to.

The Guest: Daru spends "long hours in his room, leaving it only to go to the shed and feed the chickens or get some coal." The readers know at this point that "…he who lived like a monk in his remote schoolhouse…" was satisfied with such a bleak existence. Everywhere else he "felt exiled," Camus writes. Daru had "requested a post in the little town," so he was asking to be removed from interaction with a lot of people. His alienation is very different from the alienation experienced by Krebs. Krebs was at least in a home with a family and someone who loved him. Daru was experiencing desolation and depression of his own decision but while Krebs was through with war Daru was still involved in war. Both were self-alienated but in entirely different contexts and places.

Social Alienation in The Guest and A Soldier's Home

A Soldier's Home: Krebs not only was indifferent to meeting a woman (and hence he had alienated himself from them), he was not in a position socially to become involved. "But the world they were in was not the world he was in," Hemingway writes. He was also alienated from his father in a social way because his father was really indifferent to what he was doing. When he was reading the paper at breakfast, his mother asked him, "…please don't muss up the paper. Your father can't read his Star if it's been mussed"; obviously the father ruled the roost in that household and only after he had been home for awhile was Krebs given the keys to his father's car. But when asked to go down to his father's office; there was a sense of alienation in everything that Krebs did. He didn't want to socialize with the women that he was attracted to from a distance; hence he is alienated from the social bonds he once grew up in.